The Christmas party follows a familiar course: polite chit-chat at the start, ramping up to raucous merrymaking after a few drinks, with the potential for maudlin sulking on the way home. But precisely where on the trajectory from sober to drunk is your wit and eloquence at its peak?
In an attempt to resolve this pressing question, neuroscientists from University College London, led by Ravi Das, investigated the impact of alcohol on verbal fluency.
Thirty willing volunteers submitted to an evening of drinking to test Dr Das’s hypothesis that there is a “sweet spot” of inebriation, when people are just tipsy enough to lose their inhibitions but not their mental acuity.
The recruits were first given a baseline test of verbal fluency, in which they